While playing Final Fantasy I, so many things come to mind. The game is so raw that it’s almost hard to believe it’s Final Fantasy – it’s very comparable to Dragon Warrior. Leveling up takes time and getting gold takes time. We know this is out of proportion because they redid the games and made them much easier (getting gold is less of an issue, you have MP instead of set magics for each level).

Battles can be annoying to have to choose which enemy to fight and to see your ally attack space if that enemy dies before their turn. Setting your response speed to the highest will make battles zip by but in turn you may not even be able to read what is going on.

Spending time at shops is fun since you can only buy ONE potion at a time, or one Pure at a time. Inventory’s are an issue because you almost always have a full armor inventory so you’re constantly just dropping armor (essentialy Gold) in all the Fiend’s lairs.

The classic FF monster in a box concept begins here, but instead of the treasure opening up and one battle occurring, certain spots in front of the treasures reveal permanent enemy battles (like you can step back on that spot to fight a certain enemy an infinite amount of times). You can avoid this by going at chests from different sides.

The main story (if there is one) is that these four light warriors are destined to recover the four orbs against the four fiends of earth and save the planet. Everyone you meet loves you (“Revive the Orbs LIGHT WARRIORS”) and you are generally aided by the public so talk to everyone. Lots of the text is meaningless and the translation is hilarious.

Fighters are the meat and potatoes of your party. I like to have two of them. They’re expensive as hell to keep up with but you have to fight up for exp a lot anyway (plus the other members are cheap) and if you’re really annoyed with the armor costs and such then just use a Game Genie code. By the time the Xcalber (Excalibur) and Masmune (Masamune) show up you’ll have two rocks ready to kill Chaos.

Black Belt’s and Thieves can be useful but aren’t a personal favorite. I tend to go two mages and two physical attackers, and Fighters just have the edge. They do have higher agility and better hit percentage but can’t equip much armor and not heavy swords either.

Out of the mages, I prefer one White Wizard and one Black Wizard. Red Wizard’s are the mutts of the group as they can choose white and black spells (but can’t use level 8 spells). This to me is pointless because you need Nuke. So it’s basically essential you have a Black Wizard to back up your fighters with attack magic on all enemies and a White Wizard or Red Wizard as a healer. Obviously if you want less of an attacking liability take the Red Wizard but a healing specialist is useful as well. All mages can’t equip much but the Red Wizards are a bit more physically gifted than the other two.

The bosses are pretty hard. You can usually expect to get to them wounded and low on MP so the battles are generally a war of attrition. The dungeons themselves are damn hard. Never before has a walkthrough seemed so useful. Time after time you’re giving 5, 6, 7 routes to choose from and it’s easy to get lost. There is also a plethora of treasures lying around (they’re grouped oddly sometimes). Having gold and exp so hard to attain would not be a very marketable concept nowadays as RPGs tend to require less grinding in favor of keeping a free flowing story. To me, that’s garbage, because it’s the time you have to spend churning through levels that makes you appreciate how hard a game can be.

7 comments

This is why I just don’t enjoy FF1 NES anymore. Yes, it’s the original, but the grinding is even worse than Maplestory (as I recall) and the “ineffective” and item shop issues hold it back still further. I like the idea of high difficulty, but the game should be strategic enough that leveling isn’t necessary for battles, only useful (DoaE for example; you can beat the game at a really low level, but it’s hard and you have to get lucky). Recent RPGs have suffered from either stupidly low difficulty (FFX, XII most of the time, Suikoden V, Wild Arms IV) or enforced leveling (Disgaea and its ilk). Not a whole lot of games try to find a good balance. Even Suikodens 1&2 are hard by today’s standards.

I liked in Suikoden that there were set levels for certain areas where it was basically impossible to level up to the point where it was too easy. Because of this several spots in Suikoden II for example seemed pretty difficult…the Sindar Ruins, Tinto Cave / Neclord, Luca, and the final boss all come to mind.

FFXII seemed really easy in most of the areas and very hard in others (usually doing sidequests too fast), especially some of the hunts.

Ahhh… Good ol’ FF1… It’s hard, but easy at the same time. Man, I know someone’s who’s able of killing Chaos in one or two blows! (Without cheating, only using spells on fighters!) As for the thing with XII, I was turned off from it when I was killed by about 20 Ãœber powerful monsters in the Henne Mines…

Hey Ratmir. Well, the game obviously looks beautiful compared to the other versions. But it is much easier than the NES version. This makes it easier to just play through without having to level up too often. In general the game is pretty much the same so the Final Fantasy I guide on the site should still be good